Everyone we spoke to before leaving on our Ireland road trip had the same list of places we “needed to see”. The Ring of Kerry, the Cliffs of Moher and points at Temple Bar in Dublin. But the one place that I think everyone NEEDS to be talking about is the Dingle Peninsula. This was the best part of our Ireland road trip, without a doubt. It surprised us in every way and every time the conversation turned to going back, it’s Dingle we’re talking about, a longer stay, a slower pace, more time to actually settle in and feel like a local.
The Dingle Peninsula pushes out into the Atlantic Ocean from the southwest corner of Ireland like it’s trying to get somewhere, forty-eight kilometres of mountain and cliff and bog ending at Slea Head, one of the most westerly points on the entire European continent. On a clear day from the headland, you can see the Blasket Islands sitting offshore in the grey-green water (although to be fair, on most days, you cannot).
Dingle is one of the oldest continuously inhabited stretches of land in Ireland, and the evidence is everywhere if you know how to look for it. The peninsula has somewhere in the region of 2,000 archaeological sites, standing stones, ring forts, ogham stones carved with the earliest written form of the Irish language, and the famous clocháns, the dry-stone beehive huts built by early Christian monks around the 6th and 7th centuries that have somehow held together for fourteen hundred years without mortar.
- Map of 36 Hours in Dingle
- The Wild Atlantic Way & Slea Head Drive
- Inch Beach
- South Pole Inn
- Dingle Town
- Fairy Fort Ringfort
- Hold Baby Lamb
- Dunmore Head
- Cé Dhún Chaoin
- Where to Stay in Dingle
- Doyle's Seafood
- A Morning Cliffside Stroll
- Gallarus Oratory
- Coffee in Dingle
- An Chonair / Conor Pass
- Brandon Point
- Ballinknockane Bay Beach
Map of 36 Hours in Dingle
The Wild Atlantic Way & Slea Head Drive
Driving in Dingle, you’ll get onto the R561 highwya, which is part of the road is on the Wild Atlantic Way. The Wild Atlantic Way is a 2,500-kilometre coastal route that traces the entire western edge of Ireland from Donegal in the north down to West Cork. The route was formally established in 2014, but the coastline it follows has been shaped by Atlantic weather and glacial movement for millions of years, and it shows. Out here on the Dingle peninsula, Slea Head Drive is the route you’ll follow around the island as part of the Wild Atlantic Way. The Slea Head Drive is a 47-kilometre loop that leaves Dingle town heading west, hugs the southern coastline of the peninsula around the headland at Slea Head, and returns along the northern shore through Ballyferriter.
Gaeltacht
The peninsula is also a Gaeltacht, one of the areas where Irish is still spoken as a first language in daily life. About a third of the peninsula’s population grew up speaking Irish before English, and while the language has been under pressure for generations, English was brutally enforced during the colonial period, and later through the national school system; it has held on here in a way it hasn’t in most of the country. You’ll hear it in shops and pubs, see it on road signs where the Irish name comes first.
Inch Beach
Driving into Dingle, from a large town like Killarney or Limerick, you will start the tour of the peninsula along the southern end, heading to Inch Beach. The beach stretches about five kilometres into Dingle Bay on a sand spit that juts out from the southern shore of the peninsula, and the scale of it is slightly disorienting the first time you see it. Ireland does not generally prepare you for beaches this long. The sand is pale gold and firm enough to walk on without sinking, and the dunes behind it rise several stories high in places, held together by marram grass that bends flat in the wind.
The dunes at Inch contain shell middens, prehistoric refuse heaps, essentially, left by Mesolithic communities who were eating shellfish here somewhere between six and nine thousand years ago. The wind has exposed some of this material over time. The beach you’re walking on has a lot of history underneath it.
Ireland wasn’t the first place I thought of when beaches came to mind. Somehow, the image of green hills and grey skies had crowded everything else out. Then I actually stood on one, shoes off, cold sand between my toes, staring out at water that shifted between deep teal and pale silver depending on where the clouds were.
Even outside of summer, the beaches here are worth your morning. The crowds thin out considerably, the light gets strange and flat in a way that feels almost cinematic, and you have long stretches of coastline largely to yourself. On a dry day, pack something simple for breakfast and eat it on the sand.
South Pole Inn
From Inch Beach, continue along R561 and make a short detour north, into the small village of Annascaul, to make a short stop at the South Pole Inn. If you didn’t get a chance to have breakfast on the beach, or you prefer to have a proper sit-down cup of tea/coffee, this quirky little pub is the place to go! The pub was opened by Tom Crean, who was born near Annascaul in 1877. He joined the British Navy at fifteen, ended up on three separate Antarctic expeditions, and accumulated a record of survival and endurance that reads more like fiction than biography.
He was on Scott’s Discovery Expedition, on the Terra Nova Expedition, where Scott and his party died on the return from the South Pole, and on Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition, the one where the ship was crushed by pack ice, and Crean helped row an open boat 1,300 kilometres across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia Island to get help. He survived all three. He came home to Annascaul, opened a pub called the South Pole Inn, married a local woman, and lived quietly until his death in 1938. The pub is still there, still serving, still covered in Antarctic memorabilia. If you have any interest at all in the history of polar exploration, stopping in for a pint or breakfast is a deeply strange and wonderful experience.
Dingle Town
The town of Dingle itself, known in Irish as An Daingean, meaning “the fortress,” sits at the inner curve of Dingle Bay and has been a working port since at least the medieval period. It was once one of the most important trading towns in Munster, doing business with Spain and Portugal long before most of Ireland had much contact with continental Europe.
Spanish traders were a regular presence here for centuries, and there’s a thread of that history still visible in some of the local surnames and in the old name for the bay. When ships from the Spanish Armada were wrecked off the Kerry coast in 1588, some survivors made it ashore at Dingle and actually made this place their home.
The harbour is the place to start exploring the town. Fishing boats come and go in the early morning, and the catch goes to restaurants and wholesalers the same day. And if you’re looking, while looking out into the bay, you might spot a special cast in bronze, Dingle’s resident bottlenose dolphin named Fungie. Fungie arrived in the harbour in 1983 and stayed. He became the town’s most famous resident, appearing daily for decades to interact with boats and swimmers. Fungie disappeared in October 2020, which hit the town genuinely hard. But there’s a bronze statue of him near the pier.
Dingle Art Works
There are plenty of darling places to shop in Dingle, but if I could point you towards one in particular, it has to be Dingle Artworks! This gallery was founded by June McIntyre, a formally trained artist who spent twenty years teaching art in Brighton before her husband’s retirement brought them back to West Kerry. She opened the gallery in Dingle and ran it for over seventeen years, painting almost constantly, working across silk, oil, watercolour, and botanical studies. June passed away in 2023, but her lovely daughter Louise, also an artist, runs it now. Having visited it just after losing my own mother, this was truly a special place for me.
An Díseart
Hidden away, off the main street, the entrance to An Diseart Garden or the Convent Gardens is easy to miss. But once you’re through the gate, you’ll find yourself in the center of a peaceful oasis. The convent gardens were made for the Presentation Sisters, designed by Mary Reynolds. There are three sections to the garden, all of which are free to visitors. The outermost area is the sensory and biodiversity garden, opened in 2020, and it leans into wildness deliberately. Sections are left unmowed, native planting runs throughout, and a willow tunnel threads through the middle. At the far end, a nun’s graveyard sits behind white iron railings with two stone angels at the gate. A copper beech of considerable age spreads over the whole thing, pollarded and substantial, old enough that it may have predated the convent garden entirely.
The middle section is the prayer garden, a walled rectangle reached through a pointed stone archway. Two Irish yew trees stand inside, both dating to somewhere around 1820, which puts them well over two hundred years old and entirely unbothered by everything that has happened around them. A stone labyrinth is laid into the ground. The practice is to pick up a stone at the entrance, walk the path, and set it down in a bowl at the centre.
The upper garden is the most quietly unusual of the three. It was planted with the specific intention of rooting the local community to this particular place, and the details of it are worth paying attention to. Birch and rowan trees alternate throughout, each one with a guardian family, their name carved into an old slate from the convent roof and placed at the base of the tree. The roots of neighbouring trees will eventually grow together underground, which was the point.
The Fish Box
The Fish Box, right across from St Mary’s on Green Street, is a great spot to grab lunch. The restaurant opened in 2018 and is run by the Flannery family, whose father has been fishing these waters since 1975. Their trawler, the Cú Na Mara, is where most of what ends up on your plate comes from.
If you order one thing, make it the Seafood Spice Box. It arrives as a generous combination of fish goujons, Cajun calamari, scampi, and chips, the whole thing spiced and fried and served with a side salad that you will probably ignore in favour of eating more calamari. The portions are substantial enough that two people can share them comfortably and still feel the need to sit quietly for a few minutes afterwards.
Foxy John’s
If you have time for a quick drink (just be sure you have a designated driver also with you) before heading back on the road, I recommend popping into Foxy John’s. When you walk in, you might be a little confused to see that to the right side of the bar, where people are ordering pints, on the left side are tools, hardware and other goods hanging from the ceiling.
The building has been here since 1899 and is half an Irish pub, half a hardware store and half a bike hire. The atmosphere in here is unmatched, and in old, colder days, they even have a peat moss fire burning, which was a welcoming comfort on a cold and rainy day.
Murphy’s Ice Cream
Before leaving town for the afternoon, make sure you stop at Murphy’s Ice Cream on Strand Street. Brothers Seán and Kieran Murphy opened their first shop on Strand Street in 2000 with the stated ambition of making the best ice cream in the world. The base of everything they make is milk from Kerry cows, an indigenous breed that had dwindled to barely a hundred animals by the 1970s and has since recovered to something over a thousand. The milk is richer and creamier than standard, and the difference shows up in the finished product.
But what also makes this spot so popular are its flavours. The sea salt flavour, which is probably what Murphy’s is most known for, uses salt they make themselves from seawater collected at Bín Bán beach, filtered and boiled down. The brown bread flavour contains actual baked bread crumbled through the mix. The chocolate whiskey is made with Teeling Whiskey and Valrhona cocoa. But by far the most interesting and unique flavour was Dingle Gin, made from gin steeped with cardamom, juniper berries, and lemon and orange zest. The ice cream still has alcohol in it, which they are clear to warn you about, but it doesn’t taste like booze, more like a clean citrus note up front, the juniper coming in underneath, and the richness of the Kerry cow cream holding it all together.
Fairy Fort Ringfort
Leaving Dingle Town centre, we hop onto the start of Slea Head Drive. The first stop on the Drive is going to be at the Fairy Fort Ringfort. These structures, known interchangeably as a rath, a lios, or a ringfort, were built from roughly the Bronze Age through to around 1000 AD and used primarily as fortified farmsteads for extended family groups. Ireland has an extraordinary number of them, somewhere between thirty and forty thousand, still identifiable across the country.
As the structures aged and the people who built them passed into memory, Irish folklore filled the space left behind. The ancient pre-Celtic peoples of Ireland, the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fír Bolg, became associated with these circular earthworks over generations of storytelling, and the sites became known as fairy forts, places imbued with druidic magic that no sensible person would disturb. Cutting a whitethorn tree, the fairy tree, growing on or near one, was said to bring death to whoever raised the blade.
This particular fort is privately owned and open to visitors for a small admission fee, currently around €2.50, which also includes a bag of animal feed that you can use to feed their farms animals. Sheep, goats, donkeys, ponies, and even alpacas are all very attuned to the sound of their treats, and it makes for a cute little stop.
Hold Baby Lamb
A little further along the road, you’ll spot a bright blue roadside sign that simply reads “Hold Baby Lamb.” Stop. Book in advance if you can, because this turned out to be one of the best thirty minutes of the entire trip. The farm belongs to Aedán O’Huallacháin, whose family has worked this particular stretch of land on the Slea Head Drive since the 19th century, when his great-grandmother’s family, the Sayers, were farming here. Aedán returned home to take it over in recent years, running a flock of around 260 sheep, a mix of Dorset Horn and Swaledales, breeds chosen for their hardiness on the Atlantic-facing mountainside.
Lamming starts in December and runs through to spring, with the newborns brought indoors to shelter from the weather. Most years, there are thirty to forty pet lambs on the farm that have to be bottle-fed entirely by hand. That is what you are there for. The bottle is empty in seconds. The lambs are small and warm and heavier than you expect, and they have absolutely no interest in anything except the milk. There is something about holding one that is genuinely difficult to describe without sounding sentimental, so this is the moment just to let the experience do the work.
A word of warning, this is a real working farm and the sheep are live farm animals, not manicured for your pleasure. That means they might be covered in mud or poop, so don’t wear something you can’t get dirty!
Directly behind the farm buildings sit a cluster of early medieval beehive huts, dry-stone clocháns built sometime around the 6th century without a trace of mortar, still standing on the same slope with the Atlantic laid out below them. They are included in the entry fee ( €5) and take about ten minutes to walk around. The views from the farm are gorgeous. On a clear day, Skellig Michael is visible on the horizon, and the Blasket Islands sit just offshore to the west. Booking ahead is strongly recommended in peak season. Arrive without a reservation, and you may still get in, but it’s not worth the risk.
Dunmore Head
Continuing along Slea Head Drive, you’ll arrive at Coumeenoole Beach, which leads out to Dunmore Head, the westernmost point of mainland Ireland and one of the westernmost points of Europe! There is a small car park above Coumeenoole Beach, where you can walk along a loop trail of about two and a half kilometres, depending on how far out along the trail you want to walk.
It’s a fairly easy hike, and along the way you can admire the rocks around you, which were the filming location in Star Wars of Ahch-To, the world where the Jedi Order was founded, and a sacred island which is the site of the first Jedi Temple.
On a clear day, the Blasket Islands are directly ahead, the Great Blasket large enough to read the shape of its hills, and Skellig Michael appears further out to the southwest, just visible on the horizon as a dark, angular spike rising from the water. In 1588, two ships from the Spanish Armada, the Santa Maria de la Rosa and the San Juan, came apart on the rocks in these waters after being driven off course following the failed invasion of England.
At the top of the ridge, the path passes the remains of a promontory fort, earthwork defences that once enclosed the tip of the headland. Just beyond it stands an Ogham stone, discovered lying on the ground in 1838 and re-erected the following year, inscribed with the name Dovinia, the figure after whom the whole surrounding area, Corca Dhuibhne, takes its name. The stone dates to somewhere between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. Despite the fact that it’s an easy hike, you’ll want to be wearing proper footwear. The ground is uneven, and the wind at the tip of the headland can be considerable regardless of how calm it looked from the car park.
Cé Dhún Chaoin
If you want to stop off at another viewpoint, with the same dramatic cliffs, but without the hike, you should continue along the road to Cé Dhún Chaoin / Dunquin Pier. Dún Chaoin, to use the Irish name, is the most westerly settlement in Ireland and the most westerly in all of Eurasia, excepting Iceland. The village behind the pier is Irish-speaking, part of the Gaeltacht, a community built at the point where the green fields of the peninsula run out and drop into the sea. The locals here used to call the Blaskets their nearest neighbours. The next parish after that, they said, was America.
The path down to the water is grooved with ridges cut into the concrete, put there originally to give the sheep footing on their way to the boats. The naomhógs, the traditional tarred canvas canoes rowed by three or four men, once made this crossing regularly, carrying islanders, livestock, and provisions back and forth across the Blasket Sound in conditions that were frequently dangerous and occasionally fatal. That stretch of water between the pier and the islands is not long, but it is exposed, and the combination of Atlantic swell and tidal current has claimed a number of lives over the centuries. The Armada found these waters treacherous, too. In 1588, several Spanish ships, including the Santa Maria de la Rosa, sought shelter in the Blasket Sound and were wrecked here. In summer, a ferry runs from here across to the Great Blasket for day visitors. The crossing takes about twenty minutes.
Peig Sayers, the storyteller and memoirist whose account of island life became one of the defining texts of the Irish language literary tradition, is buried in the graveyard just below the road near the pier. Her grave is easy to find and worth a quiet moment to memorialize such an important woman in Ireland’s history.
Where to Stay in Dingle
We stayed at Ceann Sibéal Hotel, which sits out on the western edge of the peninsula near Ballyferriter rather than in Dingle town itself, and I’d recommend this without hesitation! Being outside the main town means the price drops noticeably compared to the harbour-facing options closer to the centre, and what you get in return is quiet. The windows look out over Smerwick Harbour, and in the morning, you wake to the sound of the wind off the Atlantic.
It’s also worth noting that staying out here puts you in the heart of the Gaeltacht rather than on the tourist-facing edge of it, and that changes the texture of the experience in ways that are harder to quantify but easy to feel. If you’re looking to stretch your budget further without compromising on the experience of the peninsula itself, this is where I’d point you. Plus, the breakfast included in your stay is fabulous!
An Buailtín
If you don’t feel like leaving the confines of the hotel, the bar and restaurant at Ceann Sibéal is called An Buailtín, and it runs food from 12:30 through to 8:30 in the evening. The kitchen works with locally sourced ingredients and fresh fish. On Saturday nights, traditional music comes into the bar, and during July and August, it spills into other evenings of the week as well. The bar itself is easy to settle into, and the pints are well-kept.
Tigh Uí Chatháin
Tigh Uí Chatháin is just across the street and is the kind of pub that takes about thirty seconds to feel comfortable in. Known locally as Kane’s, it has been in the family for generations, the current proprietor Donal having taken over from his grandfather and kept the place more or less as it should be, which in this part of Kerry is nothing. The interior is unambiguously a pub rather than a gastropub or a bar-restaurant or any of the other things that pubs in tourist-heavy areas tend to become. The food is straightforward and done well: fish and chips, chowder, burgers, the kind of menu that suits people who have been walking the Dingle Way or driving the Slea Head loop and need something reliable. The hake in particular is worth ordering if it’s on.
Out the back, there is an open area with views across to Ceann Sibéal headland and the surrounding hills, and on a dry evening, it is a good place to bring a pint and watch the light shift. On music nights, traditional sessions come into the bar, particularly at weekends and more frequently through July and August, and the atmosphere that results is the kind that happens when musicians play for each other as much as for the room.
Doyle’s Seafood
If you prefer to head to Dingle Town for dinner, my favourite place to eat is Doyle’s, which has been standing since 1790! It started life as a pub and has been a restaurant for over twenty-five years. It was one of the first serious seafood restaurants in Dingle at a time when the town was still finding its feet as a dining destination, and it carries that history without making too much of it. The stone walls and the fish-themed art on them give the room a particular character that renovations over the years have sensibly left largely intact.
Chef and proprietor Sean Roche runs the kitchen, and the menu reflects someone who has worked in serious restaurants across Ireland and Europe and then came back to the Atlantic coast with a clear point of view. The cooking draws on modern Irish, European, and Asian influences without letting any of them dominate, which in practice means steamed Glenbeigh mussels might sit alongside Thai-spiced preparations, and the chilli garlic prawns get ordered as often as the more classical dishes. The menu changes daily depending on what has come in, so the black sole with brown butter, the roasted lobster, and the smoked haddock risotto appear when they can and not as fixtures.
The oysters are worth starting with, both raw and grilled versions, and the seafood linguine was probably even better than you’d get in Italy! The sticky toffee pudding at the end is the kind of thing that makes you understand why some restaurants have been serving the same dessert for decades. Booking in advance is strongly recommended, particularly in summer.
A Morning Cliffside Stroll
Waking up in Dingle, you should start your morning at the breakfast buffet, trying all the local specialties on offer, and always getting a slice of soda bread with an ample helping of Irish butter.
To work off that heavy breakfast, we are going to take a little hike/walk on the west side of Ballyferriter. This spot is a little hidden away, and the parking lot for the trail is right outside a farmer’s house. The hike leads you to the site of the Star Wars Sunset Meditation Rock, where the final scene of Star Wars: The Last Jedi was filmed. At the small car park, there is a little wooden donation box fixed to a post. The land belongs to a farmer who has opened it to walkers, and a couple of euros in the box is the right thing to do to give back to the maintenance of the route. And please, please, please remember to leave no trace, that means no garbage left on the trail! And close all the gates behind you.
The trail is short, about a kilometre and a half out and back, and easy enough that it doesn’t require much preparation beyond decent footwear. But footwear, boots if possible, is important. The path cuts straight through active farmland, and the sheep have no particular interest in where they leave evidence of their presence. Closed shoes are not optional.
Entering through the first gate, you find yourself in the fields. Sheep graze on both sides of the path, largely untroubled by the people walking through, occasionally glancing up with that particular expression of mild contempt that sheep have perfected. As you go, the Atlantic Ocean can be heard off in the distance long before it becomes visible.
As the headland opens out, the view arrives. Sybil Head to the north, the Three Sisters beyond it, the Blasket Islands out to the west in the water, and the cliffs dropping away below. On a clear morning, the light here is extraordinary, the kind that makes the landscape look slightly unreal, which is presumably what brought the film crew here in the first place when they needed somewhere that would read as another planet. Of course, the view here at sunset or sunrise is the most spectacular. Still, I’d argue it’s pretty impressive regardless of the time of day.
The rock itself is at the end of the path, jutting out over the cliff edge at the point where Rey found Luke at the end of The Force Awakens. In the film, the camera pulls back to reveal the full scale of the ocean and the island. For non-Star Wars visitors, the walk is worth doing regardless. The views justify the short twenty-minute walk and the experience of exploring a working farm on the Atlantic edge of Europe, with sheep watching from a distance and the wind coming in off the water.
Gallarus Oratory
From meditation rock, we begin our journey out of Dingle, but stopping in a few key locations on the way out of the peninsula. Gallarus Oratory is about fifteen minutes down the road and is home to one of the most ancient archaeological sites on the island. Gallarus is one of only three dry-stone churches in Ireland with an intact corbelled roof still in place, the other two being on Skellig Michael out at sea. It is built entirely from Old Red Sandstone quarried locally, each stone cut and laid without mortar, angled very slightly so that rainwater runs outward rather than in. The walls at the base are about four feet thick. The shape, from any angle, resembles the hull of an upturned boat, the two side walls and two end walls converging at the ridge. After a thousand or more years of Atlantic weather, it remains, as far as anyone can tell, completely watertight inside.
Most modern scholars place Gallarus Oratory somewhere in the 10th or 11th century, though earlier estimates put it as far back as the 7th or 8th. The problem is that the corbelling technique used to build it remained essentially unchanged across that entire period, right up to the 19th century. The entrance is on the west end, a low doorway with two holed stones above it that once held a form of door closure. You crouch to get in. The interior is approximately five metres long by three metres wide, dimly lit by a single small round-headed window set into the east wall.
Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about Gallarus in 1969 that reads:
You can still feel the community pack
This place: it’s like going into a turfstack
A core of old, dark walls walled up with stone
A yard thick. When you’re in it alone
You might have dropped a reduced creature,
To the heart of the globe. No worshipper
Would leap up to his God off this floor.
Founded there like heroes in a barrow,
They sought themselves in the eye of their King
Under the black weight of their own breathing.
And how he smiled on them as they came out,
The sea is a censer, and the grass is a flame.
Coffee in Dingle
From Gallarus, we are heading towards the famed Conor Pass. To get there, we drive straight back through the Dingle city center, so if you want to make a pit stop for a good cup of coffee and a pastry, or just need a reason to spend a few more hours in Dingle, you can make a stop in town before heading on our way.
One of my favourite spots for coffee in Dingle is My Boy Blue, which has been one of the best cafes in the country since Stephen Brennan and Amy O’Sullivan opened it in 2017. Brennan came from Dublin, gave up a career in finance, and ended up here making coffee from 3FE beans with enough seriousness that people buy bags of it to take home. The flat white is the thing to order here, and if you can get a seat at the window, I love sitting here and people watching!
If My Boy Blue is closed for the day, Bean in Dingle on Green Street is a great alternative. The family behind it have been roasting their own coffee since 2015 and sells it in distinctive yellow bags and modern tins. The shop is small, and the coffee is consistently good, as are the delicious baked goods.
An Chonair / Conor Pass
Coffee in hand, the road northeast out of Dingle begins climbing almost immediately. An Chonair, the Conor Pass, is the highest paved mountain pass in Ireland, reaching 456 metres at the summit. About five minutes out of town, the hedgerows fall away, and the scale of what is ahead becomes clear. The road quickly narrows, the hillsides seem to press in, and soon you’ll arrive at that lookout parking lot where you can admire everything around you. The landscape through which the road climbs is entirely the work of glaciers. During the last Ice Age, ice sheets moving through these mountains carved the valleys into their current U-shape, scraped the rock faces clean, and left behind a series of corrie lakes sitting in the hollows where the glaciers gathered before they advanced.
The Irish name ‘An Chonair’ translates simply as “the path” or “the way”. From here you can see Mount Brandon, Ireland’s second-highest peak, named after Saint Brendan the Navigator, the 6th-century monk whose voyages across the North Atlantic may have reached North America almost a thousand years before Columbus.
Brandon Point
From Conor Pass, we take a 20-minute detour to make our way to the village of Brandon and Brandon Point. Brandon Point is the northwestern tip of the Dingle Peninsula, where the ridge of the Brandon Mountains finally drops into the sea in a series of cliffs.
The cliffs below the point hold seabirds in serious numbers. Fulmars work the updrafts along the cliff face with the kind of unhurried efficiency that makes watching them quietly absorbing. Choughs, the red-billed crows that are something of a Kerry signature, pick along the cliff edges. In spring and early summer, puffins nest in the rock faces here, and there is a small concrete shelter near the point that serves as a modest birdwatching position. If you love birds, it might be worth bringing a pair of binoculars.
Murphy’s Bar Brandon
If you feel like a little break in your drive, make a stop at Murphy’s Bar in Brandon. Murphy’s Bar is right on the pier looking directly across Brandon Bay, with Mount Brandon rising immediately behind it and the full sweep of the north shore spread out ahead. This spot has been in the same family for five generations, open since around 1890! On a nice day, you can nab on one of the blue picnic tables outside on the water, and if you sit outside long enough, there is a reasonable chance of dolphins cutting across the bay!
Inside, the bar has a cozy open fire, local memorabilia, and an atmospheric type of warmth that will soothe you from the inside out. Seafood chowder with fresh soda bread is the thing to order, or a crab sandwich freshly brought in from the fishermen on the pier.
Ballinknockane Bay Beach
Driving down from Brandon Point, we hug the north shore of the peninsula, following the vibrant blue of the waters. Ballinknockane Bay sits in this stretch, part of the long sweep of Brandon Bay that curves along the peninsula’s northern flank. This section of the north shore is home to the longest continuous stretches of beach in Ireland.
The golden sand runs roughly twenty kilometres from Cloghane near the foot of Mount Brandon eastward through Fermoyle, Stradbally, Gowlane, and Kilcummin toward the Maharees Peninsula, and Ballinknockane is a quiet corner of that curve.
Driving out after a leisurely and relaxing afternoon on the beach, we make our way, slowly but surely, off the Dingle Peninsula. People return to Dingle repeatedly, and the reason is not hard to find. It is such a unique spot in Ireland where it feels like you can experience the best of everything Ireland has to offer! I truly hope this little introduction guide helps you find a reason to visit the Dingle Peninsula for yourself!
Happy Travels, Adventurers
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